The invention relates to audio and video recording devices, and more particularly, to audio and video recording devices supporting timer based recording operations for automatically recording audio and video content.
FIG. 1 shows a block diagram of a typical recording device 100 being coupled to a content signal source 102 such as a television receiver. For example, the recording device 100 could be a digital versatile disc (DVD) recorder and the storage medium 104 could be an optical disc. In another example, the recording device 100 could be a personal computer and the storage medium 104 could be a magnetic medium such as a hard disc drive. The recording device 100 receives an input signal SIN from the content signal source 102, encodes the input signal SIN to thereby form an encoded signal SENC, and stores data corresponding to the resulting encoded signal SENC onto an attached storage medium 104. In this way, the audio and video content can be later reproduced (played) according to user requirements.
As an added feature, the recording device 100 will often include a timer 106 to allow the recording device 100 to record audio and video content that will occur at a future time onto the storage medium 104. To accomplish this function, a target date and time and a program duration are first configured in the timer 106. For example, a user of the recording device 100 will first configure the timer 106 to start the encoder 108 to record audio and video content received in the input signal SIN at a particular start date and time for the predetermined program duration. The predetermined program duration refers to the length of time that the user wants to record audio and video content onto the storage medium 104. Additionally, the user may specify a particular encoding rate (if different encoding rates are supported by the encoder 108) to control the quality of the encoded signal SENC, and a particular channel (if the content signal source provides different channels of content) in order to select specific audio and video content. In this way, the user of the recording device 100 can conveniently setup the recording device to automatically record audio and video content at a time when the user is not available to manually start the encoder 108.
However, after configuring the timer 106 to record future audio and video content, a user of the recording device 100 will often still want to use the recording device 100. Therefore, some problematic situations could occur. For example, if the user configures the timer 106 to record a first predetermined duration of audio and video content and then continues to manually record additional content onto the storage medium 104, the available space of the storage medium 104 may be insufficient to record the predetermined duration of audio and video content according to the timer based recording operation. In this situation, the timer based recording operation may fail or will record only a portion of the desired audio and video content. Additionally, in another problematic situation, the user of the recording device 100 may forget that a timer based recording operation is programmed into the timer 106 and will start a manual recording operation for a first channel just before the timer based recording operation for a second channel is to begin. In this situation, the timer based recording operation will fail because the recording device 100 contains only one encoder 108 and is therefore only capable of recording audio and video content from one channel at a time.